University of Texas at Austin faculty member Sam Woolley, whose expertise focuses on the use of propaganda in new media and emerging technologies, chats with Trey Elling about MANUFACTURING CONSENSUS: UNDERSTANDING PROPAGANDA IN THE AGE OF AUTOMATION AND ANONYMITY. Topics include:
- The book’s goal (1:12)
- How propaganda initially came to be (2:20)
- Jacques Ellul’s influence on Sam’s belief’s (6:05)
- Defining computational propaganda (8:55)
- Social media bots (12:43)
- ChatGPT (16:06)
- Governments loving Facebook & Reddit for computational propaganda (17:53)
- Propaganda-bred apathy (20:55)
- Democratizing propaganda being bad for democracy (22:39)
- Why social media is bad for civil discourse (24:41)
- What he’s taken from recent #TwitterFiles & congressional testimony revelations (28:04)
- Treating social media companies as public utilities (31:07)
- If its possible to quantify the number of social media bots (34:02)
- Encrypted messaging like WhatsApp as a propaganda tool (38:23)
- The danger of automated political influencers (41:56)
- How journalists have been crucial in Sam’s understanding of political bots (45:28)
- Journalists leaning on social media posts for articles (48:33)
- Journalists using bots for good (49:29)
- Bots writing news stories (51:24)
- ChatGPT usage at the college level (52:52)
- China using social media to spread propaganda abroad (57:29)
- Why Sam is still optimistic about the future (59:00)